Raglani“The Exploded View”

Oh man, you guys. There just aren’t enough people doing synth music like Raglani right now. With Emeralds dead and Daniel Lopatin having more fun with his laptop than his Juno-60, someone has to claim the throne of analog synth mastery, and my money is 100% on Raglani. His most recent album, Real Colors of the Physical World, pairs two towering 20-plus-minute epics with two concise and extremely happy kosmische pop songs (and the epic tracks are pretty blissful too). One of those shorter tracks is the excellent “The Exploded View,” which pairs the sounds of vintage Kraftwerk with beautifully robotic vocals that recall Tender Buttons-era Broadcast. Lyrically, the song seems to blur the line between human and machine love with lines like “The circuits light up her eyes” and “This engine cradles/ Attentions divide,” calling to mind a retro-futurist relationship in the vein of Fry and the Lucy Liu-bot on Futurama. Raglani’s masterful use of vocoding serves to further blur the lines between the human and the machine in a delightful manner.

Real Colors of the Physical World is out now on Editions Mego, and you can watch the video for “The Exploded View” above.